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"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague." -Cicero

Rand Paul “Concerned About Who is Truly in Charge of Our Government”

PrisonPlanetLibertarian Kentucky Senator Rand Paul warns in a speech today that
he believes US spooks and shadow government agencies are ” drunk with
power”, and that elected representatives are privately afraid of those
operating behind the curtain.In a scheduled appearance at the University of California-Berkeley,
Paul will address the continuing domestic spying controversy.In prepared comments
Paul notes “I am honestly worried, concerned about who is truly in
charge of our government. Most of you have read the dystopian nightmares
and maybe, like me, you doubted that it could ever happen in America.”“If the CIA is spying on Congress, who exactly can or will stop
them?” the comments also state. “I look into the eyes of senators and I
think I see real fear. Maybe it’s just my imagination, but I think I
perceive FEAR of an intelligence community drunk with power,
unrepentant, and uninclined to relinquish power.”

The Senator is set to continue on the track that saw him win CPAC’s
GOP presidential nomination straw poll recently. During his CPAC speech,
Paul slammed the NSA, urging “If you have a cell phone, you are under
surveillance… I believe what you do on your cell phone is none of their
damn business.”The Berkeley speech, which takes place at 3:30 p.m. Pacific Time,
comes in the wake of the latest revelation that the NSA recorded 100% of
phone calls in an unnamed foreign country, using a program dubbed
MYSTIC, and a tool called RETRO” — for “retrospective retrieval”.The Washington Post
reported the findings yesterday, garnered from leaks by Edward Snowden.
NSA documents state that the program is essentially a “time machine”
that opens a door “into the past,” allowing a replay of the voices on
any given call, without the need for prior identification of the person
on the line.The NSA continues to argue that it is within the law for it to
operate such programs in foreign countries, however, MYSTIC did not
exempt US citizens living there.“Ubiquitous voice surveillance, even overseas, pulls in a great deal
of content from Americans who telephone, visit, and work in the target
country,” The Post reports. “Present and former U.S. officials …
acknowledged that large numbers of conversations involving Americans
would be gathered from the country where RETRO operates.”The report also states that the NSA has previously considered
expanding the program to other countries, and may already have done so.Appearing remotely during a recent TED event, Edward Snowden declared that
even bigger revelations regarding the NSA are on the way. Snowden
acknowledged that every NSA spying program we are learning about now was
planned before the 9/11 attacks, and that the event only served to
provide justification to expand and implement more surveillance
programs.Snowden said hat he is concerned with exposing “one of the dangerous
legacies we’ve seen in the post 9/11 era,” adding “They’re making the
Internet fundamentally less safe for Americans. Is it really terrorism
we’re stopping? Do these programs have any value at all? I say no. Three
branches of the American government say no.”“The bottom line is terrorism has always been a cover for action—it
provokes an emotional response,” he added. “The NSA asked for these
authorities back in the 1990s. But Congress and the American people said
no, said it’s not worth the risk to our economy. But in the post 9/11
era, they used secrecy and the justification of terrorism to start these
programs in secret.”

Also appearing at the TED event was Tim Berners-Lee, one of the
pioneers of the internet. Berners-Lee praised Snowden as a “hero”, while
Snowden said that he supported Berners-Lee’s recent call for an
Internet “Magna Carta.”“I grew up in the Internet,” Snowden said. “I believe a Magna Carta
for the Internet is exactly what we need. We need to encode our values
in the structure of the Internet. I invite everyone in the audience to
join and participate.”Other activists
seeking to battle the NSA’s domestic spying have recently targeted the
new monolithic Utah data center, promoting a campaign to cut off the
water supply to the facility. Because this is actually quite a good
idea, and it has garnered interest from lawmakers, it has not gone unnoticed by those who are “drunk on power”, as Rand Paul describes them.The NSA is now actually arguing that
its water bill should be declared top secret and that it should not
need to declare how much water is being pumped into the Utah facility as
a matter of national security.“By computing the water usage rate, one could ultimately determine
the computing power and capabilities of the Utah Data Center,” wrote the
NSA’s associate director for policy and records, David Sherman in an undated letter
written in response to a request for the information from The Salt Lake
Tribune. “Armed with this information, one could then deduce how much
intelligence NSA is collecting and maintaining.” Sherman argues.Documents uncovered by the Tribune have indicated that the NSA facility could use between 1.2 and 1.7 MILLION gallons of water PER DAY.

Meanwhile, the Defense Department’s Inspector General, who is
supposed to oversee the NSA’s activities and ensure they are within the
law, admitted yesterday that he had no idea that the NSA was collecting bulk metadata on Americans’ communications.“From my own personal knowledge, those programs, in and of themselves, I was not personally aware,” Anthony C. Thomas said.Thomas also announced that the Pentagon has no intention to
investigate the matter. Thomas said he was “waiting to see the
information that the NSA IG (inspector General) brings forward with the
investigations that are going on, and what we often do not want to do is
conflict.”That is some valuable oversight from the executive branch!